We are nearly at the end now. A few days separate us from the moment the most beloved of all creation ﷺ would leave this world, and before we reach it there is one Thursday we have to sit with: a Thursday so heavy that the man who witnessed it, Ibn Abbas, would weep whenever he remembered it and call it the greatest calamity.
It is the day the Prophet ﷺ, deep in the pain of his final illness, asked for something to write with. And it carries a question that, sooner or later, finds every Muslim who loves this religion: did he ﷺ mean to name who would lead the ummah after him? Dr. Yasir Qadhi does not skip the hard part. He walks straight into it, slowly and honestly, the way it deserves.
Why we cannot skip this
Most retellings of the seerah do not stop at the passing of the Prophet ﷺ. They carry on a little further, to the choosing of Abu Bakr and the army of Usama marching north to Syria, because those events grow directly out of his final days and cannot be cut loose from them. But there is something else that has to be faced here, and Sheikh Yasir names it plainly: what happens around the death of the Prophet ﷺ is the most contested ground in the whole story, the place where the two great strands of Islam, Sunni and Shia, first part ways. You cannot tell this honestly while pretending one side does not exist.
He says it almost reluctantly. He would rather not reopen old history, because in the end what happened, happened, and reading blame backwards into it changes nothing. But this is not a question a Muslim can simply avoid. At some point in every believing life, someone raises it: did this happen, did that happen, why did they do this. So we go back to the beginning of the split and we look, carefully, at one specific incident. It is sensitive. It will be handled as such.
What a Thursday it was
The incident is called the incident of Thursday, or the incident of the scrolls, the qirtas being the parchment they wrote upon. And here is the first thing to understand, the thing Sheikh Yasir wants no one to miss: this report is in Bukhari and Muslim, fully authentic, and we as Sunnis affirm it one hundred percent. It is in our own books. There is nothing to hide and nothing to deny. The difference between the two sides is never whether it happened; it is only how it is read.
Ibn Abbas narrates it. As the pain of the Prophet ﷺ grew sharp, he said: bring me something to write with, and I will write for you a writing after which you will never go astray. Pen and paper, in our words. And in the room, among those who loved him most, there was hesitation. One voice, and the books of hadith do not name who it was, said: the Prophet ﷺ is overcome by pain, and we have the Book of Allah, and that is enough for us. Others said no, ask him what he wants, bring it to him. The voices went back and forth. And when the Prophet ﷺ saw them differing in front of him, he said: get up and leave me, it is not right that you should dispute in my presence.
Then, that day or soon after, he gave three last instructions. Expel the idolaters from the Arabian Peninsula. Honor the visiting delegations the way he had always honored them. And a third the narrator confessed he had forgotten, lost to us forever in the telling. Ibn Abbas would say afterward, with grief that never left him, that the calamity, the whole calamity, was what came between the Messenger of Allah ﷺ and that writing.
Before the controversy, what the day teaches
Imam Bukhari narrated this single incident in seven different places in his collection, and Sheikh Yasir pauses on why, because before any argument there are quiet lessons here that both sides share. That the Prophet ﷺ reached for pen and paper at all tells us to write our knowledge down; this is among the proofs that recording sacred knowledge is beloved. That his last counsel included the delegations tells us to receive those who come seeking Islam with warmth and generosity. That he disliked the disputing tells us how ugly division is, and how much uglier it was in his presence.
And one tenderness the scholars draw out: do not sit too long at the bedside of the sick. The visit should be gentle and brief, a checking-in, not a burden laid on someone already in pain. Even from this hardest of scenes, the ummah was being taught how to love one another well.
The first question: what did Omar mean
Now the controversy itself, and Sheikh Yasir frames it as three honest questions rather than a verdict. The first: how do we understand the one who said the Book of Allah is enough for us, the voice our tradition identifies as Omar, who turned the moment aside rather than rushing to fetch the pen.
He spent real time gathering how the classical scholars answered this, and they are remarkably of one mind on the spirit of it. Al-Khattabi held that Omar never imagined the Prophet ﷺ was mistaken; he saw the severity of the fever and feared the writing might be something the ummah could not bear or might later be twisted, and he knew the Companions sometimes reasoned aloud with the Prophet ﷺ when circumstances allowed, as they had at Badr and at Hudaybiyyah. Al-Qadi Iyad and al-Qurtubi read it the same way: a command can carry signs that soften it to a request, and Omar must have seen something in the moment that made him judge it so, and for that sincere effort he is rewarded. Imam Nawawi went further still, saying the scholars agreed this incident displays Omar's understanding and foresight, that he feared a thing being written that people might fail to live up to and be held to account for, and that he leaned on the Qur'an's own testimony of completeness.
And here is where Sheikh Yasir refuses to pretend. We Sunnis look at this, he says, and we are biased, there is no denying it, just as the other side is biased. Our bias is built on a track record: twenty years of Omar before this day and the years of justice still to come, and the Prophet's ﷺ own words that had there been a prophet after him it would have been Omar, that even Shaytan flees the path Omar walks. If you love someone and they do something ambiguous, you read it in the best light. If you do not, you read it in the worst. He will not sugarcoat it: Omar's action here is genuinely ambiguous, the explanations are good attempts and no more, none of us were in that room. What we know of the man asks of us a leap of faith, that whatever he saw, he had a very good reason for it. Those who do not love him will not make that leap. That, honestly stated, is the heart of the disagreement.
The second and third questions: what, and why the silence
الْيَوْمَ أَكْمَلْتُ لَكُمْ دِينَكُمْ وَأَتْمَمْتُ عَلَيْكُمْ نِعْمَتِي وَرَضِيتُ لَكُمُ الْإِسْلَامَ دِينًا
“This day I have perfected for you your religion and completed My favor upon you and have approved for you Islām as religion.”
Surah al-Ma'idah 5:3 Read 5:3 with tafsir
The second question: what did he ﷺ actually want to write? One answer is the simplest: the three instructions themselves, and when the writing did not happen, he spoke them aloud instead. But there is an older, weightier reading. Sufyan ibn Uyaynah and others noticed that a few days earlier, in the very beginning of his illness, the Prophet ﷺ had said something recorded just as firmly in Bukhari and Muslim: call for me Abu Bakr, that I may write a document, for I fear that someone will aspire to leadership and say I have more right, but Allah and the believers will refuse anyone but Abu Bakr. Read together, the scrolls may have been pointing the very opposite way from what is often claimed, toward Abu Bakr, and this was the considered view of more than one early scholar. From our tradition, Sheikh Yasir notes, there is simply no evidence at all for the other reading.
Then the third question, the one he finds most decisive of all. Set Omar's motive aside entirely. The incident of Thursday is agreed by everyone. The Prophet ﷺ passed away the following Monday. That is Thursday evening and then Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and into Monday: roughly four full days. If this writing was as world-changingly important as the claim requires, how did four days pass with nothing more said? He was not a man who abandoned what Allah commanded; he never once gave up a charge from his Lord. And in those four days the very people most beloved to that side, and to us, were at his side the whole time, and he said nothing further to them either. Ibn Hajar makes the same point: it is not possible the Prophet ﷺ would leave something that weighty hanging for four days. Imam al-Mazari narrows it to two options, and both close the door: either Allah commanded the writing, in which case it could never simply have been blocked, so it must have been abrogated; or it was the Prophet's ﷺ own judgment, which after the disputing he chose to let go. Either way, had it truly mattered that much, it could not have been left undone.
Through all of this the Sheikh keeps returning to the same gentle anchor: the religion was already whole. Allah had said it plainly, and Omar himself leaned on these words, that the faith was perfected and the favor completed before this Thursday ever came.
What was clear, and where we land
مَّا فَرَّطْنَا فِي الْكِتَابِ مِن شَيْءٍ
“We have not neglected in the Register a thing.”
Surah al-An'am 6:38 Read 6:38 with tafsir
There is one more thing that settles Sheikh Yasir's heart on this, and it is not an argument about the scrolls at all. It is everything else in those final weeks. Over and over, in his last days, the Prophet ﷺ kept pointing to Abu Bakr. He insisted Abu Bakr lead the prayer, and when they could not find him at first and Omar stepped forward, the instruction came back: no, find Abu Bakr, let him lead. Never in his life had the Prophet ﷺ commanded another to lead the prayer while he himself was present in the masjid. For us, Sheikh Yasir says, you cannot get more significant than that. And the year he could not make Hajj, it was Abu Bakr he sent as leader of the pilgrims; when Ali was sent after, Ali himself made clear he came not as the commander but to deliver a message. In the two things he delegated, the prayer and the Hajj, the same name kept surfacing.
So where do we land? The incident of the scrolls is real, affirmed, never denied, and read very differently by different hearts. Sheikh Yasir, who says of himself that he is no apologist and calls a spade a spade, leaves us three honest conclusions. That Omar, by the weight of who he was, must have had a sound reason we were not there to see. That the writing, if it named anyone, the evidence leans toward Abu Bakr, never toward the other claim. And that no matter what you decide about the first two, four silent days make it impossible that something of that magnitude was simply lost. The deeper truth underneath it all is the one Allah declared: nothing was neglected, nothing was left out. The religion arrived complete. We were not orphaned by a missing page.
He ends, as he began, refusing to inflame it. What happened, happened. We hold our reading with conviction and with adab, and we do not let a fourteen-century-old grief poison the love that the whole story was meant to plant in us.